


Impaired Judgment

by okapi



Category: Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Alcohol, Angst, Drowning, Drug Use, F/F, Fem!John - Freeform, Fem!Lestrade, Fem!Sherlock, Fem!mycroft, Genderswap, Loneliness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-07
Updated: 2014-01-09
Packaged: 2018-01-07 20:58:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,433
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1124308
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/okapi/pseuds/okapi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John is lonely and makes a series of unfortunate misjudgments. Now with an alternate ending where John survives.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

John Watson did not want to go home. 

She sat on a stool and watched her pint. Like water levels in a lake, season after season, she watched the level of gold, frothy liquid rise and fall as she downed each glass. Sherlock’s dark mood had cast a gloom over the Baker Street flat that seemed interminable to John. Day after day of murky silence. No cases. No communication. The flat and John gathered dust.

So she sat and watched her pint.

She took out her phone. 

“Greg, it’s John. Just wanted to know if you wanted to grab a pint. Haven’t seen you for a while. Ummm, that’s all. Bye.” John winced at her needy tone and wished there was some way to reach into the ether and wrench her words back.

She ordered a whiskey chaser. 

Four tiny round pills were burning a hole in her pocket. A hurried nurse, a belligerent patient, and, in the middle of her double shift, John had found herself with several opioid painkillers that had literally slipped out of the hospital system of narcotic accountability. The hypocrisy of the situation did not escape her. John’s nightmare, the one that kept her nailed to the stool, was to return to Baker Street and find Sherlock with a needle in her arm. It would rend the garment of her life as surely and as swiftly as Afghanistan had. But here she was, slowly and purposefully, snipping at her own faculties and fuzzying her reality, with more implements in her pocket. Just in case.

One more whiskey chaser. 

Nothing more invisible than a middle-aged lady, someone important had once said. And tonight she felt an embodiment of the sentiment. Hollow and old.

She took out the mobile and looked again. The more things changed, the more they stayed the same. Now, instead of you waiting by the phone, the phone waited by you, but the adolescent anxiety endured. She took a deep breath. She started to compose a text and then put the phone down. She picked it up again.

**Hello.**

She sent it to a four digit number. So many things were a mystery: how the message would find its way to a tiny mobile phone in the inside jacket pocket of a minor government official, whether it would be interpreted or understood, and what exactly she wanted to communicate to her... _whatever Mycroft was._

She had to pee.

John paid her tab and got up, gingerly searching her surroundings for landmarks, guideposts, and hazards. The beauty of a local was that it was, of course, local. So she stumbled down the street towards the flat, only pausing to crouch and pee between two parked cars, steadying herself with a death grip on the chrome.

The dread was still there, lurking on the edges of her consciousness, when she entered 221 and started up the stairs. She did not hear any movement, but that wasn’t noteworthy. Sherlock had barely emerged from her bedroom in the last few days. Up, up, up, she went.

And that’s when a series of unfortunate misjudgments occurred. 

First, John misjudged the last step to the flat, she lurched and fell, cracking her head soundly on the floor and scraping her arm on the top stair.

 _Jesus Christ, that hurt._ The world swirled around her.

But she was a soldier as well as a drunk, so she pushed herself to an unsteady standing position. She took her phone out and looked at it. Nothing. She yelled in disgust and threw the phone against the wall. It hit with an unsatisfying clunk, and the back cover and battery went flying in opposite directions.

She misjudged the radio silence. 

Then, John looked at Sherlock’s closed bedroom door. _She’s in there doing God knows what to herself in the insane asylum section of her fucking Mind Palace and there’s nothing I can do about it._

John misjudged the stillness behind the door.

John made her way down the hall, clumsily removing her clothes and shoes as she went, bumping into the walls. 

_Bath. That’s what I need. Bath was like tea that you sat in._

She giggled.

She ran the tap. She must have dozed for a moment because the water level was suddenly almost to the top of the tub. She hastily turned off the tap. She got up and reached for a bottle of eucalyptus oil, but she misjudged the distance from the sink to the tub and ended up dropping the bottle. It cracked and the oil spilled on the floor. She slipped and hit her hip on the edge of the tub.

 _Jesus Christ! Pain!_

But wait, she had something for pain. She crawled back to the hall and found her trousers. She clenched her fist around the pills and crawled back to drink directly from the sink tap. 

Then she hoisted herself up and over into the tub, loudly splashing the water on the floor. She felt like a zoological specimen, a mer-creature captured. She relaxed, and the water blanketed her.

John misjudged the amplified depressant effect of combined opiods and alcohol on the human body, in particular the nervous and respiratory systems.

They say that hearing is the last sense to go, but John did not hear the front door open energetically or sharp-heeled boots taking the stairs two at a time.

“John? Pack a bag! Lestrade has a case. Paris. Tonight….”

She did not hear a message. 

“John, just got your message. I’m in Paris, international conference for law enforcement and Your Majesty’s secret bollocks, but I’ve come across something that is just up your and Sherlock’s alley. I’ve already texted her about it and want you two to come, tonight if possible, and check it out. I know Sherlock’s been a royal twat lately—and believe me, love, she knows it, too—so I’ll buy you a pint and then some when you get here.”

Or a quiet beep.

**Meet you in Paris.**

She didn’t hear anything.


	2. Alternate Ending

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> An alternate ending where John survives because it suits me to put this story into the little world I'm building.

John heard a beeping. 

A very insistent beeping. 

A very familiar beeping. 

A beeping that meant something was been monitored, something vital. Like a heart. She had to check the beeping. It was her job to check. To check to make sure everything was okay. She tried to turn toward the beeping, to locate it.

Her eyes were fuzzy; her limbs leaden; a fierce burning trailed down her throat into her chest. A burn that seemed to clamp her throat shut. 

She used all her strength to pry open her eyes.

“Welcome back, love. You gave us quite the scare.”

Lestrade. She watched relief wash over her friend’s face. The beeping was her. Hospital room. Hospital bed. She reached back in her memory to place herself among the odd surrounding. Beer. Bath. Pain. _Oh_.

She voluntarily pushed air out her lungs. “Was..n’t, wasn’t…” She had to make Lestrade understand. 

“Trying to off yourself? Yes, I know. I mean, if you were going to do yourself in, you wouldn’t drown yourself in the bath like a Victorian heroine, would you?” Lestrade considered. “I mean that’s what service revolvers are for.” She looked at John conspiratorially. “But you’d do well to let the wildebeest you call a girlfriend know that. When you’re able, of course.”

She remembered Sherlock’s closed door. _Sherlock!_ She looked with panic at Lestrade, and the beeping quickened. She turned her head as much as her stiff muscles would allow. The room was empty, save for Lestrade.

“Sh…Sher”

“Sherlock’s fine. Well, she will be. So will Mycroft. After three days with you on a vent, they were both getting on my nerves. So I handcuffed them. Together.” Lestrade gave her a wry smile.

John’s eyes widened. She tried to laugh, but the burning in her lungs stopped it short. 

“No. They’re outside smoking. I gave them a pack. Each. It seemed the least self-destructive thing they could do at the moment. Oh, and your brother stopped by. Something about the lengths you would go to not to wear a dress. Charming, that lot.” 

John gave her a faint nod.

“Sherlock and Mycroft’ll be in shortly. You just rest and do your best to recover. There’s a puzzle waiting for you and Sherlock in Paris. Something I think you’ll find very interesting. Hell, I may even take a couple of personal days and look into it myself with you.”

John raised her eyebrows. Good, something to do. 

“And know,” said Lestrade as she gave John’s hand a squeeze, “That you are not alone.” 

John smiled and closed her eyes.


End file.
